It was a nice start...

Rating: 7/10 (5 August 2006)

The Island is a film about the not so distant future when a corporate minded entrepreneur finds a way to keep you alive longer than you should be. This was a great idea, and the film started out pretty well.
I really liked the first 45 minutes or so of this film. It had you curious, showed excitement...the story seemed to be going somewhere. So where did it loose it for me? When the two escaped from the situation they were in. It stopped being interesting and started becoming patchy. I had a lot of questions about how "quickly" the two escapees adapted.
Then there were the excessive action scenes that Michael Bay, the director, is famous for but seemed misplaced in several areas. This could have been quite the cool sci-fi film more than going for the big budget blow up film. All of the elements were there. It just seemed to go overboard once the two subjects left the facility.
Scarlett Johanson and Ewan McGreggor are the two subjects of this film and they were cast fine. Actually, I had no problem with ANY of the casting, everyone fit. Sean Bean was wonderful as well. The problem was with how the story unfolded, where the action was and when and a few plot holes that could have been easily taken care of.
Is this film awful? No. Is it bad? Not ... really. It's just one of those films that has so much potential and didn't grow where it should have grown -- and that is in the sci-fi realm.
What a great concept this film has. Loved the first 45 minutes of production designing. It could have been along the lines of sci-fi society films like THX 1138 or 2001 in which you were presented a future society that the human race wished to expand and the means of which human and in some cases technology played a part. The Island poses another theory that is very plausible as well.
Maybe they didn't want to make a "thinking man's" film and wanted to go for a "popcorn" film instead. A "thinking man's" film elements are there...but so was the "popcorn" - and that's too bad.